Everything at the quantum mechanics level is overwhelmingly noisy.

If you try to keep track of every detail, your brain will explode.

But if you average everything out at the right scale, it turns out a number of stable, clear dynamics pop out.

A great video on YouTube on fluid dynamics at multiple levels of abstraction that made this very intuitive for me.

My time on search at Google had a similar vibe, I realize.

"All of the random human behavior on the web is weird noise… but if you average it correctly, you can get extremely clean, useful signal!"

One of the reasons this works is that no individual instance of a human decision (e.g. what query to issue, which pages choose to link to which others) actually changes the emergent outcome of search ranking much, which reduces the desire to game them.

But in aggregate, those signals are enormously valuable, a summarized human intent.